The next French President as Predicted by AI

Emmanuel Macron, Youngest, and The Next French President

Monsieur Emmanuel Macron is set to become the next French President. He will be the youngest in the French history to hold the top office. As it unfolded, after a close victory in the first round which happened on 23rd of April, Macron won comfortably in the second round. He trumped the far-right competitor, Marine Le Pen by 66% to 34% vote share.

The French Presidential Election was one of the major political events of this year. The election has been dubbed as the most unpredictable election in decades. The popularity and importance of the Election have increased significantly in midst of the recent turmoils in the EU and France’s stand on anti-immigration policies.

This came after the incumbent President François Hollande has decided not to compete citing very low popularity ratings as the reason and has become the first sitting president in the modern French history not to seek re-election.

Emmanuel Macron(24.01 %) and Marine Le Penn(21.3 %) came out as the winners of first round held on 23rd of April. The five main candidates are a mixed bag of major political ideologies. Emmanuel Macron of the newly formed En Marche party is a young 39 years old Centrist, pro-EU, and business-friendly candidate. Marine Le Penn of National Front believes in Far-right, anti-EU, anti-immigration and ‘France First’ ideology. Benoit Hamon of Socialist Party is dubbed as the ‘French Bernie Sanders’. Francois Fillon is a pro-EU conservative. Once a front-runner, his popularity took a great plunge due to some scandals. Jean-Luc Melenchon of Unsubmissive France is a far-leftist, anti-NATO candidate.

Our AI-driven Prediction about the next French President

A study by Bruegel predicted the Brexit process better than the opinion polls. Inspired by the study, we decided to run our Twitter Pulse on the Twitter conversations mentioning the hashtags #presidentielle and #presidentielle2017. We analyzed the sentiment associated with the tweets.

To predict the sentiment of the Twitter conversations with the aforementioned hashtags, we used Deep Learning driven sentiment analysis. We allotted a confidence score, ranging from 0 to 100%, to every tweet. The confidence score depicts the confidence of the sentiment attached to the tweet. For eg:

This tweet mentioning Macron has a positive confidence score of 89%. We did the same analysis for all the tweets. For more refined results, we only took into account the tweets having confidence score more than 80%. We ran this analysis for all the tweets mentioning the hashtags (#presidentielle and #presidentielle2017) and mapped it with the candidates mentioned in it.

The overall performance of a candidate was measured by taking the ratio of numbers of positive to negative tweets. For better visibility, we normalized our calculations by the total number of positive and negative tweets. The positive score was calculated by taking the ratio of positive tweets mentioning the candidate to the total number of positive tweets. Similar calculations were done for calculating negative tweets.

The number of tweets carrying negative sentiment was almost the same for both the candidates. But Macron had the edge in the number of positive tweets. Just before the final election round, a televised debate took place between the candidates. Macron came out as the winner in the debate, according to this opinion poll. We can not say if the debate had any major effect on the elections, but it is astonishing to notice that the debate polls were in favor of Macron by 63%.

What did the Twitterati Predict?

AI Driven Contextual Search Analysis Around the Keyword next French President

We also did contextual search analysis on the tweets mentioning the hashtags. The contextual search not only analyzes the tweets containing certain keywords, but also the tweets that are contextually related to these keywords. The main keywords we tracked were: EU, Corruption, Immigration, and Economie. For example, the contextual search will also select the tweets containing words like Corrupted, Corrupt and other similar words.

For Macron, the number of positive tweets was higher than Le Pen for all the keywords. Macron is a pro-EU and business-friendly candidate and our contextual search depicts the same.

For the tweets carrying negative sentiment, Le Pen’s number was higher, owing to the fact that she is anti-EU and anti-immigration. Also, Marine Le Pen was considered bad for the French economy according to the contextual search analysis.

Final Verdict regarding the next French President:

While the votes are still being counted and final reporting is yet to happen, the vote share stands around 66% for Macron and 34% for Le Pen. It is unlikely that these numbers are going to change majorly. We wish Emmanuel Macron a successful term as the French President.

Our predictions approximately match the election results. Nowadays, apart from opinion polls, social media can also come in handy in predicting the election result. The recent major political events, namely Brexit and US Presidential Elections, were also predicted correctly by using AI driven analysis of social media. Due to the extensive use of social media and more people getting online, social media channels have become important platforms for candidates and voters to share their opinions. As several firms analyzed and reported about the use of social media in predicting the election results, we presented you our insights using intelligent social media listening tool Karna. We constantly publish such studies. Subscribe to our blog to read more on social media listening and analysis.

Karna.ai is a division of ParallelDots. Karna is a social media marketing research platform. We collect and analyse millions of mentions from News, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and deliver AI driven in-depth insights through automated reports and custom analysis.